While I was an honorable man in her eyes, she did not love me. But the minute she understood what I was, when she breathed the true and foul odor of my soul, love was born in her – for she does love me! Well, well! There is nothing real, then, except evil.
Octave MirbeauDesire can attain the darkest human terror and give an actual ideal of hell and its horror.
Octave MirbeauWhen one tears away the veils and shows them naked, people's souls give off such a pungent smell of decay.
Octave MirbeauThe greatest danger of a terrorist's bomb is in the explosion of stupidity that it provokes.
Octave MirbeauSheep run to the slaughterhouse, silent and hopeless, but at least sheep never vote for the butcher who kills them or the people who devour them. More beastly than any beast, more sheepish than any sheep, the voter names his own executioner and chooses his own devourer, and for this precious "right" a revolution was fought.
Octave Mirbeau